Parcurile Muresului, Targu Mures.
April 2026
Location: Targu Mures, Romania
Client: Ordinul Arhitecților din România (OAR), Primaria Targu Mures
Competition: Third place
Team:
@studioberosabdul:
Christian Beros, ruxandrasandulescu, Raluca Grecea, alessia_anghel, petruta_panescu, teodora.trotea, andreea.zigu
@studiopractica: Jaime Daroca, José Mayoral, José Ramón Sierra, Joel Salamero, Ines Cacciolato, Josefina Joo Lee, Pablo Sanfuentes, , Costan Svinti
Colaborators: Kelvin Ho (Renderings), Osvaldo Moreno (landscape consultant)
The river remembers
Târgu Mureș is a city that has spent a century forgetting its river. The Mureș flows through it, beside it, and under it; channeled, embanked, and drained underground. Each generation’s engineers solved the problem of water with the tools available to them: concrete, straight lines, and canalization. Each one of them leaving remnants of an industrial past in which water was made to work, not made to live.
Today, considering the challenges of a postindustrial city, and the urgent need to respond to extreme weather events, cities are looking back to forgotten water realms. Places of a city that are so close but so far and anonymous for its own citizens.
Beneath the concrete of the Turbinei, the meander geometry of the original Mureș arm persists. In the compacted grounds of the Hippodrome, the soil retains its capacity to absorb. Along the embankments of the river, the floodplain forest that once ran the full length of the valley has disappeared, but in the municipality park is present as a latent ecological memory, ready to flourish if given the conditions.
The aim of our project is not to invent a new landscape. But to remove the obstacles that prevent the existing one from re-emerging. Therefore, the need to realize an act of restoration.
We understand the three sites not as separate objects, but as a complex landscape, three moments in a single water journey, each one playing a distinct hydrological and programmatic role. We propose the urban reintegration of these sites acting as ecological organs rather than simple infrastructure, reconnecting the three sites as an integral part of a larger territory.